Drizzle - A Microkernel DBMS for High Performance Scale-Out Applications
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Contents 1 Drizzle Client Requirements 1.1 Design Philosophy 1.2 Non-Functional Requirements 1.2.1 Database Support 1.2.2 Connectivity 1.2.3 Error Handling 1.2.4 User Support 1.2.5 Admin 1.2.6 Back end 1.2.7 Formatting 1.2.8 Interactive Functionality 1.2.9 Pipes

Drizzle Client Requirements

must Must Have Items

want Want to Have Items

nice Nice to Have

Design Philosophy

• Modular Connection design. One abstract connection socket with plugin support.

Non-Functional Requirements

Database Support

• must Provide command line interface to relational database servers.
  • must Ship with a libdrizzle plugin supporting Drizzle/MySQL/MariaDB servers.
  • want Support for DBs not in the Drizzle/MySQL/MariaDB family through the use of a generic SQL server API and pluggable modules providing features specific to a particular server.
  • want Integrate with built-in console plugin in Drizzle.
• want Support Drizzle's concurrent queries.

Connectivity

• must Support for connectivity to
  • SSL/TLS connections to DB servers.
  • remote TCP
  • local TCP
  • Unix domain sockets
• want Reconnect to servers without restarting client.
• nice Concurrent connections to more than one server (which may be running different software as well).

Error Handling

• must Die gracefully
  • must Open files and connections closed cleanly.
  • want Any query data still in memory should be scrubbed.
• must Provide sane return codes that have meaning.
  • must Include clear documentation of return codes.
  • want Provide clear error messages as much as possible.
• must Respond to signals in an appropriate manner.

User Support

• must Man page (with examples) (developed as final version of requirements)
• want Provide built in help for all commands, command line options, etc.
• want Support the ability to use external editors through the use of the users $EDITOR environment variable.
• nice Documentation on Drizzle wiki.

Admin

• must Support config file (eg .drizzlerc) that can be ignored if necessary.
• must Maintain command history (in a file too for persistence).
• want Do not retain passwords in memory after use (change from current client)
  • ... except when running in batch mode.
• want Provide server administrative tools (SQL allows much of this, provide meta cmds otherwise).
  • Retrieve server status (threads, memory use, queries, etc)
  • Kill queries
  • Threads
  • Servers Change passwords Manage tables (populate tables, modify table fields, delete tables, etc)
  • Replicate DBs Migrate DBs across servers

Back end

• must National Language Support (NLS) (Gettext? What is Python's facility for that?)
• must Support utf8/international character sets (the default in drizzled).
• must Batch processing of commandline or file-supplied queries
  • want Show preview of changes/resulting queries before performing them (option)

Formatting

• want Variable-format terminal windows.
• want Support customized output: change separators, omit column names, vertical vs. horizontal output alignment, column type information, etc.
• want Customizable command terminators.

Interactive Functionality

• must Support Meta Commands
  • want Support the current list of meta commands unless there is reason to to leave particular commands out.
  • want Add meta command(s) like psql's \d.
• nice Syntax highlighting.
  • nice Preliminary syntax checking (before submitting a query to server)
• want Tab completion
  • This will need to be toggle-able (to accommodate tab separated fields, etc).
  • Complete on tab for:
    • SQL keywords
    • DB names
    • Table names
    • Field names

Pipes

• want Pipe query answers to pager (conditional on more lines than terminal has?)
• want Redirection and piping of queries (like a normal shell).
  • want Pipe to external proceses.
  • want Redirect to external files.
  • nice Data processing and filtering constructs.
• want Logging: ability to write out all output to a file instead of/as well as stdout.